A message from Andrew Rasiej, Tech President's Publisher

Thank you for visiting techPresident, where politics and technology meet. We’re asking our readers to help support the site. Let us tell you why:

Since 2007, we've expanded techPresident's staff and daily work to exhaustively look at how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. To provide the independent and deeply informed journalism we do, we need to find ways to support this growth that will allow us to keep the majority of our content free.

The initial release contains data from more than 215,000 responses to questions coming from more than 13,000 polls. By going beyond the aggregated polling and analysis provided by other sites such as Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight, the Huffington Post hopes to make polling data more transparent and in doing so help journalists, researchers and policy analysts see the "limitations and biases of polls and the organizations that conduct [polls]." In an e-mail to techPresident, Scheinkman wrote that "until now there hasn't been any up-to-date, publicly accessible database of American opinion polls ... it's all available but spread across dozens of sites and PDFs."

The release includes answers to general questions about views on the political direction of the country and more narrow questions about specific races. The Huffington Post has also organized the data by subject and geography into more than 200 charts. The API will also provide information about the methodology of each poll, the original source as well as the Huffington Post's estimates about opinion trends for each question.

The Huffington Post is publishing the data as an HTTP-based application programming interface, or API, with JSON and XML responses, and plans to make it available through Atom feeds and in CSV format in the future.